The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Plattsburg: World War I training center in Plattsburg, New York.

  Booker T. Washington: Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the founder of Tuskegee Institute in 1881, was a black leader and educator. His autobiography is entitled Up from Slavery (1901).

  Callao: port in Peru near Lima.

  rajah: prince from India.

  Catharine of Russia: Catherine the Great (1729–96) was born Sophie Augusta Fredericka. Empress of Russia (1762–96), she was regarded as an enlightened despot.

  Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine: popular East Coast resorts. Biddeford Pool was in Maine, St. Augustine in Florida.

  Pollyanna: from the novel Pollyanna (1913) by Eleanor H. Porter. The main character, Pollyanna, is a child who always looks for something to be glad about despite troubles. The name has come to refer to foolish cheerfulness.

  “Oh, blessed are the simple rich, for they inherit the earth!”: A reference to the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:1–2; Luke 6:20–26. From Matthew: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” From Luke: “Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of heaven.”

  MAY DAY

  “May Day” was composed in March 1920 on the threshold of “The happiest year since I was 18,” as Fitzgerald put it in his Ledger. His first novel, This Side of Paradise, was to be published on March 26, and Zelda Sayre would become his bride on April 3. But this long, intricately woven story that Fitzgerald thought of as a novelette originated in the dark spring of 1919, when everything he wrote was rejected, his job writing copy for an advertising agency was disheartening, and his only escape was to throw himself into drunken parties with former college friends and just-met acquaintances who were, like him, living and wandering aimlessly in New York, their prewar idealism quickly fading to disenchantment. As the now-famous May Day riots of 1919, described vividly in the story, were taking place in New York and all over the country, Fitzgerald scarcely seemed to have taken notice of things beyond his own personal tribulations. Less than a year later, however, he brought his recollections of the spring and early summer of 1919—of the May Day riots, of his drunken escapades, and of his personal despair—together in the story of his partially autobiographical persona, Gordon Sterrett, in “May Day.” In the table of contents of Tales of the Jazz Age, he describes the three central episodes of the story, which appeared in the July 1920 issue of The Smart Set, as having taken place “in the spring of the previous year.” The events were “unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz,” but he wove them together into “a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.” When Fitzgerald collected “May Day” in Tales of the Jazz Age he included it, for no obvious reason other than its general sense of finality, in the section entitled “My Last Flappers,” and he changed the ending of the Smart Set version to the much less ambiguous one that we have in the Tales of the Jazz Age version reprinted here.

  Biltmore Hotel: large, elegant hotel at Madison and 43rd Street in New York City. It was gutted and rebuilt as the Bank of America Building.

  Delmonico’s: elegant restaurant at Fifth Avenue and 44th Street. It opened at that location in 1898 and closed in 1923.

  Welsh Margotson collars . . . the “Covington”: Welch Margetson was a London haberdashery. The “Covington” was a detachable shirt collar.

  J. P. Morgan: J. P. Morgan (1837–1913) was an American banker, influential in the financing and management of most of the U.S. railroads in the late nineteenth century. With Andrew Carnegie he organized and financed the United States Steel Corporation.

  John D. Rockerfeller: John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) was an American oil financier. He and his brother William formed the Standard Oil Company. He was one of the richest men in the world, with a fortune estimated at a billion dollars.

  Bolsheviki: the most radical of the Russian Marxist groups led by Nikolai Lenin. The Bolsheviks advocated war against the bourgeoisie and dictatorship of the proletariat. After the Revolution in 1917, the party was referred to as the Communist Party.

  Shell hole: slang for coward.

  Key: In Tales of the Jazz Age Rose is the speaker. Since this response is to Rose’s earlier remark, Fitzgerald likely intended the speaker here to be Key.

  inconnu: unknown person, stranger.

  Boche-lovers: Boche is a slang term for German.

  Childs’: Childs’ Quick Lunch restaurants introduced the self-service cafeteria concept in 1889 with a chain of restaurants catering to downtown businesses.

  Columbus Circle: Intersection of Broadway, Eighth Avenue, and 59th Street at the southwest corner of Central Park. A statue of Christopher Columbus was erected in the center of the circle in 1892.

  Maxfield Parrish moonlight: Parrish (1870–1966) was a popular American painter and illustrator. He illustrated books and magazines, and his prints and calendars gave him wide exposure to the public. He used pure, transparent, thin oil glazes in combination with thin layers of varnish, giving his colors a great luminosity. His brilliant, cobalt-blue skies were known as “Maxfield Parrish blue.”

  Commodore: The Commodore Hotel was on the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Lexington. It was gutted and rebuilt as the New York Grand Hyatt.

  It . . . Hudson: This sentence in Tales of the Jazz Age reads, “It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before that he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.”

  THE JELLY-BEAN

  Though Fitzgerald records in his Ledger the composition date of “The Jelly-Bean” as May 1920, he likely began writing it in late January or February while he was awaiting the publication of This Side of Paradise. He wrote Ober that he was sending along a story that was the second in a series of “Jellybean stories (small southern town stuff ) of which The Ice Palace was the first.” The Post rejected the story, as did several other magazines, but after the publication of This Side of Paradise in March, Fitzgerald revised and returned the story to Ober in June with the setting changed from Tarleton, Georgia, to “a little city . . . in southern Mississippi,” so that it would not be considered “a series with The Ice Palace.” Metropolitan bought “The Jelly-Bean” for $900 in June 1920 and published it in the October issue. Fitzgerald included it as the lead story in his second story collection, Tales of the Jazz Age, changing its setting back to Tarleton and including it in the category of “My Last Flappers.” Nancy Lamar, the Southern belle–flapper in “The Jelly-Bean,” is undeniably in the line of descent of Sally Carrol Happer in “The Ice Palace” (years later Fitzgerald would describe “The Jelly-Bean” as “the first story to really recreate the modern southern belle”); but Nancy’s extraordinary impulsiveness points to a self-destructive streak just below the surface of the free-spirited, fun-loving Fitzgerald heroine, a quality that had not been evident before in his earlier flappers or belles. Metropolitan commented in a headnote to the story that Fitzgerald was known for writing about “the young American flapper”; but as it also pointed out, “Here is a new story which shows another side of Fitzgerald’s realistic gift.”

  gob: slang for sailor in the U.S. Navy.

  “Back Home in Tennessee”: “Just Try to Picture Me (Back Down Home in Tennessee),” 1915 song with lyrics by William Jerome and music by Walter Donaldson.

  Sally Carrol Hopper: In “The Ice Palace” her name was “Happer.”

  Liberty bonds: bonds issued by the United States to pay for World War I.

  Dresden figures: The ceramic industry of Dresden, Germany, was known for elegant, hand-painted porcelain. Real lace was dipped in liquid porcelain and then applied to ceramic figurines. Dresden figures were thus delicate and fragile.

  dope: Coca-Cola.

  Lady Diana Manners: Diana Cooper (1892–1986), Br
itish actress and socialite known for unconventional behavior.

  “Slow Train thru Arkansas”: Thomas William Jackson’s 1903 book On a Slow Train Through Arkansas convinced many readers that people in Arkansas didn’t wear shoes. The book cover depicts a train being held up by cattle on the tracks.

  “Lucille”: Lucille, or, A Story of the Heart: A Pathetic Domestic Drama in Three Acts, 1836 play by William B. Bernard (1807–75).

  “The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright: Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944). During the first quarter of the twentieth century his novels outsold every other American writer. The Eyes of the World, published in 1914, is critical of the realism and naturalism in literature and art during this time. Dale B. J. Randall in “The ‘Seer’ and ‘Seen’ Themes in Gatsby and Some of Their Parallels in Eliot and Wright,” published in Twentieth Century Literature, 10 (1964), 61, notes similarities between The Eyes of the World and The Great Gatsby. Both books deal with “the relationship between falseness and fame.” Randall also notes that the dust cover of The Eyes of the World may have inspired the billboard of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg looking over the wasteland of ashes.

  THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

  In the summer of 1915 Fitzgerald paid a visit to the Montana ranch of his Princeton classmate and lifelong friend Charles W. (Sap) Donahoe, and this visit inspired the setting for what would become his most extravagant fantasy, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” The story provides a powerful foreshadowing of themes that Fitzgerald would develop more fully in The Great Gatsby, themes related to the emptiness of the American Dream and the carelessness and immorality of the very rich, who, like the Washingtons, care only about preserving the personal wealth that their diamond mountain represents. Fitzgerald began “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (originally entitled “The Diamond in the Sky”) in the fall of 1921 at White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and mailed the twenty-thousand-word manuscript to Ober on October 16, ten days before the birth of the Fitzgeralds’ daughter, Scottie, calling it “a wild sort of extravaganza partly on the order of The Off-shore Pirate + partly like The Russet Witch.” Though Fitzgerald had hopes that the conservative Saturday Evening Post would buy the story, he was not surprised when they declined to publish his scathing indictment of the American middle-class obsession with wealth. When McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar also declined the story, Fitzgerald trimmed it to fifteen thousand words; and Ober eventually sold it for $300 to The Smart Set, which published it in their June 1922 issue. Fitzgerald selected “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” for inclusion in the “Fantasy” section of Tales of the Jazz Age, maintaining in the table of contents that he had written it “utterly for my own amusement.” Earlier he had lamented to Ober the fact that “a genuinely imaginative thing like The Diamond in the Sky brings not a thing,” while “a cheap story like The Popular Girl written in one week while the baby was being born brings $1500.”

  St. Midas’ School: fictional school, the naming of which references the legend of King Midas, who turned everything he touched to gold.

  Ritz-Carlton Hotel: luxurious hotel at Madison and 46th Street in New York City.

  duvetyn: good-quality wool with a smooth, plush appearance like velvet.

  Tartar Khan: The Mongolian Tatar tribe (often misspelled as Tartar) under Genghis Khan overran Asia and Russia during the thirteenth century.

  Crœsus: Greek king of Lydia (560–546 B.C.) known for his wealth.

  acciaccare: an embellishing musical note.

  Titania: queen of the fairies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  Gargantua: fictional giant in stories by the French writer François Rabelais (1494 –1553). Gargantua was voracious and vulgar but intelligent and educated in humanist ideas of the Renaissance.

  George Washington: George Washington (1732–99), first president of the United States. Washington had no children.

  Lord Baltimore: Lord George Calvert Baltimore (circa 1580–1632), English statesman. He was refused permission to settle in Virginia. His son Cecil founded the colony of Maryland on land granted to him after his father’s death.

  El Dorado: mythical kingdom in South America rich with gold.

  General Forrest: Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821–77), Confederate cavalry leader. He is believed to be one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan.

  first Babylonian Empire: circa 1850–1600 B.C.

  to peach on you: to betray.

  Pro deo et patria et St. Mida: Latin for “For God and country and St. Midas.”

  canteen expert: The Red Cross, YMCA, and other charities set up hospitality centers for soldiers. Young women hosted the coffee and hot chocolate bars and entertained the soldiers.

  Empress Eugénie: Eugénie Marie de Montigo (1826–1920), empress of France as wife of Napoleon III. Noted for extravagance, she lived in exile after 1870.

  Nemesis: Greek goddess that dealt out divine justice and avenged wrongdoing.

  Prometheus Enriched: reference to Aeschylus’ drama Prometheus Bound and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Prometheus Unbound.” (See note 30 to “Head and Shoulders.” )

  God was made in man’s image: Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”

  cut me off with a hot coal: Rather than waiting for blisters to heal, a hot coal might be applied to them, popping the blister and cauterizing the wound. Scar tissue formed.

  WINTER DREAMS

  In his scrapbook beneath a quarter-page photograph of his first serious love, Ginevra King, and an announcement of her coming wedding in September 1919, Fitzgerald penned this handwritten line: “THE END OF A ONCE POIGNANT STORY.” The love story of Fitzgerald’s relationship with Ginevra King, which began during the Christmas holidays of 1914 and ended when she threw him over “with the most supreme boredom and indifference,” is at the heart of “Winter Dreams,” the most important of the stories that anticipate the subjects and themes of The Great Gatsby. The writing of “Winter Dreams” was begun while the Fitzgeralds lived with their ten-month-old daughter, Scottie, at the White Bear Yacht Club outside St. Paul, Minnesota, during late August 1922; he finished it in mid-September in St. Paul’s Commodore Hotel, shortly before the Fitzgeralds returned to New York for the publication of Tales of the Jazz Age. In the version of “Winter Dreams” bought by Metropolitan for $900 and then published in the December 1922 issue (the version reprinted in this volume), Fitzgerald’s full-paragraph description of Judy Jones’s house at the beginning of section three is used with only slight alteration to describe Daisy Fay’s house in chapter eight of The Great Gatsby. In the version of “Winter Dreams” that Fitzgerald revised for inclusion in his third story collection, All the Sad Young Men (1926), he removed virtually the entire paragraph of description of the house. This is but one of many substantive changes Fitzgerald would make when he revised the story; but this one is particularly interesting since it suggests that Fitzgerald did not wish to draw attention to the fact that he had taken descriptions from his “popular” fiction and put them in The Great Gatsby, which had appeared less than a year before All the Sad Young Men. The most important connections between “Winter Dreams” and The Great Gatsby, of course, lie in the parallels between Dexter Green and Jay Gatsby, between Judy Jones and Daisy Fay, and between the relationships in two of Fitzgerald’s most beautiful love stories.

  bloomers: full, loose trousers gathered at the knee.

  knickerbockers: pants that rolled up just below the knee. The style came from Dutch settlers in New York in the 1600s.

  “The Pink Lady” and “The Chocolate Soldier” and “Mlle. Modiste”: Broadway musicals.

  coupé: two-door automobile.

  the war came to America: Congress voted to enter World War I on April 6, 1917. The war ended with the armistice on November 11, 1918. The battles were all fought in Europe.

  ABSOLUTION

  In his Ledger, Fitzgerald recounted an episode in his life when, at the age
of eleven, he lied in confession by saying to a priest, “Oh, no, I never tell a lie.” This event is the origin of his brilliant story “Absolution,” which, like “The Ordeal” and then “Benediction,” centers on a moral dilemma associated with a sacred rite in the Roman Catholic Church. In April 1924, just before leaving Great Neck, New York, to live on the French Riviera, where Fitzgerald would complete The Great Gatsby, he wrote about “Absolution” and his novel-in-progress to Maxwell Perkins: “Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged & in approaching it from a new angle, I’ve discarded a lot of it—in one case 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story).” Then in late June, after writing the draft of the novel that would be published in April 1925, he wrote Perkins that “Absolution” was to have been “the prologue of the novel.” Years later Fitzgerald would write in a letter that the story “was intended to be a picture of [Gatsby’s] early life.” Understandably Fitzgerald’s comments have prompted speculation about the circumstance of the story’s composition and its relationship to The Great Gatsby. “Absolution” may indeed have been a prologue to a very early draft of the novel that Fitzgerald began while he and Zelda lived in Great Neck between mid-October 1922 and April 1924. This draft of the novel, however, does not survive. The manuscript that Fitzgerald wrote on the Riviera during the summer and fall of 1924, in essence the version of The Great Gatsby that was finally published, does not, of course, contain “Absolution ” as a prologue. After its publication in the June issue of American Mercury, Fitzgerald selected “Absolution” for inclusion in his beautifully haunting 1926 collection All the Sad Young Men, which also contained his Gatsby-related “The Rich Boy,” “Winter Dreams,” and “ ‘The Sensible Thing,’ ” as well as what was perhaps truly his last flapper story, “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les.”

  the valley of the Red River: the Red River Valley in northwestern Minnesota has broad, flat prairies.

  “Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!”: perhaps a reference to Samuel Blatchford (1820–93), who was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1882–93).